


The cold knows when to come

by TheHousekeeper



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 21:52:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18269996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHousekeeper/pseuds/TheHousekeeper
Summary: When they were all gone, when there was no one left, death would be there waiting for him.If that’s not a friend, he doesn’t know what is.





	The cold knows when to come

**Author's Note:**

> My first work in this fandom, so I haven't got a beta, and I threw this up on AO3 literally the moment it was finished, so it's very probably absolute crap.
> 
> I am aware that this fandom has a (completely reasonable) obsession with Q, which I am 100% behind, and thus I sincerely apologize for the sad lack of Q in what is a post-Skyfall character study of Bond.

—

 

 _The cold knows when to come._  
_What beats in me_  
_I still bear._

          – Theodore Roethke, “Give Way, Ye Gates”

  
— — —

  
Only once before had he come so close to dying.

He’d been in Mozambique, on a deserted stretch of beach north of Beira. Well, now it was deserted. Until very recently, there had been an abandoned warehouse a half mile away, where James had been held and tortured for three days until a drone had managed to deliver him an earpiece and an explosive.

Now it was a smoking, gaping wound of twisted metal with a flattened dune in front of it, which was where James had fallen after throwing himself from the fourth floor a half-second before the explosion. He’d made it only partway down the beach before they’d caught up with him and efficiently aerated him with armor-piercing rounds.

The last of them was lying not two feet away. A neat hole, which James had put there with the very last of his strength, seeped black between his blank brown eyes.

“007.” M’s voice in his ear. “You need to get yourself to a hospital.”

“Mm.” That did sound like a reasonable course of action. The sand was warm beneath him, and the sky so blue, blue as blood beneath the veins. High above, one bird circled on a thermal, spiraling in front of a cirrus cloud. Blue so deep, it was like falling.

“007.” There were other people on the line as well: James could hear them breathing. Or maybe it was the ocean.

So warm, the sand. It took away his aches. Soaked up the blood his heart was beating away in spurts. James scrabbled his cold fingers into the sand, felt the fine grains part for his fingers. The sun was blazing up the edges of the clouds. They smoldered like heated bronze. Waves were washing over his feet now: the tide coming in.

“Bond, get up right now.”

“Yes marm,” James said, because that wasn’t a tone that brooked disagreement. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his strength, and through his lids the sky burned blue.

“ _James_.”

His eyes startled open again. The bird was back, with a friend. James wondered if they were vultures, waiting. _Soon_ , he told them. _Not long._

He’d lost time, he thought. Maybe only a few seconds.

 _Keep your trousers on,_ he wanted to say, _I’m getting up._ But his jaw muscle didn’t seem to want to work, which was fine, really. A soft breeze swept his hair off his forehead. A wave reached partway up his calf, stinging distantly in his abrasions.

There were scrambling sounds coming from his earpiece, M’s voice saying, “Christ. How long for medical evac?”

“Twenty minutes.” Tanner, far away.

“007, did you hear that? Twenty minutes. Try to stay alive.” She paused. “007?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

They all lapsed into silence, except for Tanner’s intermittent updates on the progress of the medical team. James’s knees were wet, his lower legs partially sunk in half-liquid sand. It felt like melting. Serene, was the word he was looking for. He wished M would speak. He wished she’d say his name again.

“M,” he tried to say, but there was a bubble of something in his throat, and it came out garbled.

She heard anyway. “Yes, Bond?”

But he had nothing to say, so he just listened to the silence of her, waiting.

When he’d opened his eyes again, he’d been in a hospital in Johannesburg with three bullet holes in his torso, all of which had missed major organs. He’d lost fifty percent of his blood volume, his spleen, and every one of his fingernails. He’d broken two ribs and four bones in his right hand, suffered a concussion, dislocated his right shoulder, sprained his ankle, torn a calf muscle, and bruised every part of his body. Ten percent of his skin was covered in first- and second-degree burns, most of the rest of it had been carved into rivers by his torturers’ rusty knife, and Tanner was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, typing on a laptop.

“What are you doing here?” James rasped.

Tanner didn’t look up. “M thought you might recover faster if you were annoyed.”

It was raining gently outside, drops plinking against the gray window. James closed his eyes and saw blue, blue, blue.

“How well she knows me,” he said.

  
— — —  


James isn’t given much to reflection. It’s too close to sitting still, and in his world, death comes for you when you’re not in motion.

If he were, though, he might reflect that, ever since that moment, he’s been on borrowed time.

The ocean is still lapping at his knees. He just can’t feel it anymore.  


— — —

  
He goes to Venice. He goes to Tokyo. He goes to Calcutta. He goes to Buenos Aires. He goes to Algiers, Amman, Angkor Wat. He goes to Stockholm. He goes to Istanbul.

After that, he stays dead for a while.

Death can’t find you if it doesn’t know where to look.  


— — —

  
Thousands of cities, hundreds of countries, dozens of missions, several decades, a handful of heartbreaks. And always death, there with him, since he was a boy. It has known him longest. It will know him last.

_You don’t trust anyone, do you?_

He didn’t. There wasn’t much point. People left, they lied. They betrayed you, whether they meant to or not. It was out of their control. But when they were all gone, when there was no one left, death would be there waiting for him.

If that’s not a friend, he doesn’t know what is.  


— — —

  
He carries M’s body to the old, shattered altar of the chapel. He tucks a tartan blanket around her. All night he sits in the front pew. He is crying, he thinks. It’s hard to know what’s blood, what’s tears, what’s water, what’s ocean, what’s sky.

It’s not the tears that scald, not the heartbreak that burns. It’s the jealousy.

In the morning, he takes Kincade’s truck and drives back to London dry-eyed. Tanner calls him a cold bastard and slaps him. Moneypenny puts her hand on her mouth and turns away.

He doesn’t attend the funeral.  


— — —

  
He doesn’t trust Mallory, either, but he’d determined in the Parliamentary hearing room that he is someone James can rely on to clear an exit during a firefight, which is a close second.  


— — —

  
He goes to Syria. He goes to Antigua. He goes to Mongolia, Ukraine, Serbia, Panama. He breaks his arm falling from a building in Dakar and crushes three toes that get caught beneath a reinforced steel plate one cold night in Astana. His bones ache in the rain, and whole sections of his nerve system have died off, patches of numbness invisibly splotching the surface of his skin, like spreading cities tumouring a scarred landscape.

The sex stops working against the numbness, which doesn’t mean he stops trying it. Fast cars work for a little longer.

“How do you do it?” Moneypenny asks.

It’s late, and James has just returned from a four-day mission in Somalia, during which he didn’t sleep at all. There’s still desert dust in his mouth.

“What.”

He can see himself and the white tiled room, its sterile fluorescence sharp in the black windows. His skin is powdery, campfire ash in the morning. He loosens his tie and takes another swig of his beer. It tastes like water. Moneypenny’s hand is tight around the neck of her bottle, and she is leaning forward as if to hear a secret.

“Cheat death so often.”

James thinks of when he was dead. The beach bar in the cool twilight. The scorpion, poised on his wrist.

It wasn’t the movement of your hand, tipping, that would set off the sting. It was the jostle when you stopped.  


— — —

  
He’s in Iraq when it happens, on a rooftop in Mosul. There’s a brief, bloody fight in which James’s cheekbones are slightly rearranged before the man he’d come to kill is dead. Blood covers half his face and his AK-47 is lying on the roof tiles a few inches from his reaching hands, still warm.

James is left staring at a boy watching him from halfway behind a chimney with big, horrified eyes. An underfed, scrawny thing in a baseball cap. A refugee, probably. He’d have been brought up to lay bombs, to know how to pull a trigger between the breaths. James remembers being that age. It was when his parents had died.

From somewhere, he scrabbles up with bloody fingertips a soothing gentleness and an air of reassurance. It is an expression he knows well, the one he gives women and, sometimes, his colleagues before an impossible mission. An expression of confidence.

This is what people want out of him, more than death and duty: the sense he can bend the world to his will. People don’t want to feel _success_. They want to feel _safe_.

“You’re going to be all right,” he says. “You’ll see.” He gives it another well-considered beat, then nods with a comforting half-smile.

The boy says nothing. James turns and begins walking back across the roof.

There is a burst of gunfire behind him, and a bullet rips through the outer layer of his right deltoid muscle, knocking him down. His weapon is in his hand before he’s turned over, half-recumbent, to see the boy, face patinaed with tears, struggling with the dead man’s heavy automatic. The shock of the kickback must have thrown him off-balance, but he’s almost got it raised again.

There is a white haze over the sky. The light is thrown back in flat glints from the barrel of James’s gun.

“Don’t,” says James in Arabic. “Please don’t.”

The boy settles the butt of the rifle against his shoulder, wraps his hand around the grip, and lifts.

James fires.  


— — —

  
After that, he collects on some of his accrued vacation time.

Before he leaves, he stops by Q-branch and asks for one of the cars, a Jaguar F-type coupé in eiger grey that tops out at four hundred kilometers per hour.

“You’re going _skiing_ ,” says Q, in disbelief. He is sipping milky Earl Grey from a chipped mug, and the intense smell of sugar emanating from it is making James feel slightly queasy. There is a spot on the collar-flap of his checked shirt, the side not caught under the neck of his cardigan. “What could you possibly need to outrun, an annoyed moose?”

“Have you ever been pursued by an annoyed moose?” James asks mildly. “It’s rather more disconcerting than you might expect.” He means this. Moose are very large, much larger than they have any right to be. He prefers dealing with tigers, when it comes to it. Though maybe that’s down to all the practice.

Q gives him the car.

Maybe it’s because he knows that James will just take it anyway; at least this way, the paperwork will be done properly and Q won’t have to suffer the indignation of being so obviously and summarily ignored.

James doesn’t really care why, in the end. He drives the corkscrew road through the mountains in third gear, and takes every turn too fast.  


— — —

  
James wakes up alone in a hotel room in the Swiss Alps. There is snow outside his window, and the air is cool and blue with early dawn, and his throat tastes like blood, because he is screaming.

He stops. He kicks off the sweaty sheets and lies, panting, with one hand resting on the warm bare skin of his chest, feeling the breath go in and out. If he prods a little, he can feel the uneven bumps over his ribs, the scar tissue from Mozambique that never healed right.

Here’s what he hadn’t told Moneypenny:

There was only one thing you needed to do to avoid setting off the scorpion’s sting.

You needed not to shake.

 _Steady, James,_ he tells himself. _Steady._  


— — —

  
He comes back and goes straight to a mission briefing.

“007,” Mallory greets him, not looking up from his desk. He sends James to Islamabad. To Cairo. To Singapore. To Bogota. Madrid. Lodz. Oaxaca. Tbilisi. Hong Kong.

M, when she slipped, sometimes used his first name. Mallory never does.

That’s all right. Better not to be surprised. There’s a scorpion on his wrist, after all.

It doesn’t need a name to be deadly. Neither does he.  


— — —

  
James falls asleep in the dark on the cool floor of his flat, half a bottle of chilled vodka sweating a ring into the woodwork a few inches from his hand. When he wakes, it’s to an aching back and M staring down at him.

“Sir,” he says without moving. At least he’s dressed appropriately, having failed to take off anything other than his suit jacket the night before.

M looks away as if something is hurting him. Maybe his back is sore in the mornings, too, James thinks. It’s a souvenir of age, something they share. James doesn’t take it for granted, and he doesn’t envy M the long hours sitting behind a desk.

“Bond –” begins M, and James goes cold.

“No,” he says.

“Maybe it’s time –”

“It’s not. You’ll know when it is. I’ll know when it is.”

“You’ll be dead when it is.”

 _Yes,_ James thinks. _Yes, that’s the point._

His throat feels like a window with all the glass broken out of it. Nothing but sharp edges.

“M,” he says, “I only have one promise I can rely on. Don’t take it away from me.”

They say nothing. M looks down at him silently and James breathes. Breathes. It lifts up his whole body. He is all air.

M nods. He lets himself out, closing the door gently behind him.

James lies on the floor with one hand resting on his chest, watching the dawn draw across the ceiling. It is gold and orange. He closes his eyes and sees its afterburn. Blue, blue, blue.  


— — —

  
James comes home from Jakarta. He is routed through Rome. He is routed through Frankfurt. He is routed through Vienna. Through Paris, Athens, Warsaw, Prague.

He keeps moving.

Sometimes, he thinks of being dead. The cool beach, the warm bar. The scorpion, poised on his wrist.

He doesn’t linger on it. He does not shake.

He waits.


End file.
